UNEXPECTED SUCCESS FOR ‘PIRANHA 3D’ SPAWNS A SEQUEL, ‘3DD’

It’s a sink-or-swim moment for the filmmakers behind the sequel to “Piranha 3D.”

Combining a silly, self-aware sensibility with over-the-top gore, the original comedic horror film starring Richard Dreyfuss, Christopher Lloyd and Elizabeth Shue as townsfolk fighting off prehistoric flesh-eating fish became a just-add-water cult hit when it was released two summers ago opposite more mature fare such as “The Expendables” and “Eat Pray Love.”

Dimension Films, the division of The Weinstein Co. that produces horror and sci-fi fare, quickly christened a sequel with the tongue-in-cheek title “Piranha 3DD” — yes, that’s pronounced double-D — in hopes of riding the same wave of success as “Piranha 3D,” which reportedly cost $24 million but reeled in more than $83 million.

The original also chomped off an unexpected amount of guilty-pleasure acclaim, not just from horror blogs, but from mainstream critics. “Piranha 3D” was called “bloody watchable trash” by Entertainment Weekly’s Owen Gleiberman, “ ‘Jaws’ without the art” by Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers, “cleverly gory” by Christy Lemire of The Associated Press.

“I don’t even know if we can top it,” lamented sequel director John Gulager, whose horror film “Feast” was the subject of the Bravo moviemaking series “Project Greenlight” in 2005. “I don’t think that was totally our goal. We just wanted to be different. They had Academy Award-winning actors and stuff. We just wanted to have our own separate story.”

Dimension didn’t screen “Piranha 3DD” for critics, not a very positive indicator of a film’s quality.

Gulager and his “Feast” screenwriters dived into the “3DD” project after Alexandre Aja, the previous film’s director, opted to work on new material. “Piranha 3DD” finds the evil critters making their way underground and through plumbing toward a tawdry water park called Big Wet.

“We wanted to double everything,” “Piranha 3DD” screenwriter Marcus Dunstan boasted. “If the first one had laughs, we wanted to double the laughs. If the first one had violence, we wanted to double the violence. If the first one had offensive elements, well, actually, we wanted to triple the offensive elements. That was always the DNA of this movie.”

The film, which opened Friday in theaters and through on-demand video services, was originally scheduled to debut last October, but Gulager said production was delayed so the cast and crew could film in warmer weather at the Jungle Rapids water park in Wilmington, N.C. The filmmakers admit that the premise is outlandish but the setting was too fun to dismiss.